The hacktivists set up a Twitter thread, #OpPayPal, and claim that at least 20,000 people have canceled their PayPal accounts in response to their call.

PayPal denies that.

“We haven’t seen any changes to our normal operations, including account opening and closing, overnight,” PayPal spokesperson Anna Pignataro told the E-Commerce Times.

Anonymous had previously launched a major distributed denial of service against PayPal and other companies in retaliation for their freezing funds to Wikileaks.

Does the hacktivists’ calling for a boycott instead of unleashing hack attacks on PayPal indicate they’re moderating their approach? Or are they feeling the heat from law enforcement?

The Boycott Call

In their communique, the hacktivists expressed outrage at the FBI’s willingness to arrest and threaten people involved in what they describe as ethical, modern cyberoperations.

They also point out that suspected hacktivists face the same severe punishment as criminals hacking for money, and contend that there’s a difference between a politically motivated cyberattack and criminal hacks.

The hacktivists also say they’re not afraid of law enforcement and accuse law enforcement agencies of being terrorists.

Divided We Fall

The call to boycott PayPal instead of hacking that company’s servers could be seen as an improvement in tactics.

“I think what we’re seeing is a mature response from the Anonymous hackers that may surprise people who may think of them as a one-size-fits-all engine of outrage,” Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told the E-Commerce Times.

Perhaps that moderation is due to divisions within Anonymous’s ranks.

For example, Anonymous initially responded defiantly to the FBI’s July 19 arrest of 16 suspected Anonymous members and subsequent statements by deputy assistant FBI director Steve Chabinsky in an interview with NPR.

It released a statement on July 21 that, among other things, vowed to carry on the fight against governments and corporations and stated that hacktivists are not scared anymore.

That same day, an individual known as “Sabu,” who’s depicted as a senior member of Anonymous, tweeted a promise to release emails obtained when Anonymous hacked into the servers of the News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS) newspaper The Sun.

However, another Anonymous tweet stated the hacktivists wouldn’t release those Sun emails because that might compromise the court case against its alleged members.

On the other hand, on July 22, Anonymous was still accessing and downloading data from the servers of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which it had hacked into previously.

What is going on in the ranks of the hacktivist community?

“They’re getting a lot of heat, not just from law enforcement, but other parts of the hacker community,” security consultant Charles Dodd told the E-Commerce Times. “So, now they’re focusing on getting a result.”

Of Politics and Punishment

Anonymous and LulzSec are now “turning pseudo politician,” Dodd stated.

“They’re trying to create a political result so the threat of the attack will become as pertinent as the attack itself,” Dodd explained. “They’re truly becoming a political force.”

However, the hacktivists’ activisties do constitute cybercrime, Dodd stated. Nevertheless, perhaps they should not be punished as harshly as cybercriminal gangs who hack into systems to steal data for sale or to take over victims’ bank accounts.

“I think that the methodology the government is using to prosecute the Anonymous members arrested July 19 is a [blanket] witch hunt methodology,” Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told the E-Commerce Times.

“I think it’s wise for Anonymous to recognize that they’re being lumped in the same broad category of people who are launching far more malicious and deadly attacks, and to see if they can alter the ground rules but still make a change.”

The progressive entrepreneur who pays bright, young students $100,000 each to drop out of school and pursue business ideas, is one of Silicon Valley’s more prolific investors. After selling his then-startup PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel bankrolled Facebook in its early days. A series of successful investments has placed him comfortably on the Forbes billionaire list.

Inspired by Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Thiel has stated that he thinks sea colonization is an important step in securing mankind’s future on Earth. “Decades from now, those looking back at the start of the century will understand that Seasteading was an obvious step towards encouraging the development of more efficient, practical public sector models around the world,” Thiel said in a statement released in 2008, when he made his first investment ($500,000) in the project.

His most recent grant ($1.25 million) to the Seasteading Institute may help propel development of independent island colonies off the coast of San Francisco.

Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer (and grandson of Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman), is working on the seasteading project. “Big ideas start as weird ideas,” Friedman told Details magazine in response to critics. “The ultimate goal is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.”

Thiel and Friedman say that the colony should be ready for “full-time settlement” in seven years. Margaret Crawford, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and recognized expert on urban planning, isn’t so convinced. “It’s a silly idea without any urban-planning implications whatsoever,” she told Details.

What do you think? Is a floating sea colony science fiction or sound planning?

‘;
var coords = [-5, -72];
// display fb-bubble
FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, ‘top’, {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: ‘clear-overlay’});
});

PayPal is great but the various fees they charge you to receive payments are not so great. And if, like me, you prefer not to connect your PayPal account to your bank account, they certainly don’t make it easy for you.

You can link your PayPal account to a credit card, but once you’ve spent or received a total of $10,000, you are required to connect a bank account. PayPal will draw funds from that bank account from then on, which means no more credit card rewards. If you look closely, there is an option for PayPal to draw funds from your credit card instead, but it’s an obscure link that most people miss.

PayPal’s ubiquity makes it hard to avoid, but there are a few other options.

Amazon WebPay allows you to make online or mobile payments using your email address, just like PayPal. This is a no-brainer. There are no fees for sending or receiving money, and you can add funds with a bank account or credit card. Not everyone accepts Amazon WebPay, but I use it whenever it’s an option.

Square is an application for Android and iPhones. The app, along with Square’s external attachment, turns a mobile phone or tablet into a credit card terminal, allowing anyone to accept person-to-person payments. I use Square when someone owes me money after a night out. Instead of splitting a dinner check with a large group, I can pay with my card and everyone else can pay me. There is, however, a 2.75% fee per transaction.

Dwolla charges a 25-cent fee for each transaction, which can take place online or at a brick and mortar store. Their mobile application allows smartphone users to find nearby merchants that accept Dwolla.

Take five or ten minutes to investigate each of these options in order to determine which makes the most sense for your particular online payment needs.

Robert Siciliano, personal security expert contributor to Just Ask Gemalto, discusses hackers hacking hotels on CNBC. Disclosures

Let Others Know About This Post
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

York County residents contacted authorities after someone allegedly attempted to withdrawal money from their bank accounts through PayPal, an online payment website, York County Sheriff?s Office reports said.

A York woman said she became aware of the problem when her bank informed her she?d overdrawn her bank account. Multiple withdrawals in amounts in the range of $41 and $55 were allegedly made through her PayPal account she seldom uses.

A Fort Mill man filed a complaint after finding that PayPal had allegedly attempted to make a $100 withdrawal from his daughter?s bank account. The daughter had recently received a letter from Western Union asking her to confirm personal information to set up
an account.

Above: Peter Thiel (left), Andrew Ryan (center) and Ayn Rand (right): three people with sensible ideas about human beings

Thiel’s dream, which he’s so far bankrolled with $1.25m, is borne out of the ideas of Ayn Rand, who you may know as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century – or, equally, as the inspiration for Andrew Ryan in BioShock. The scheme is to float microcountries out into international waters and allow citizens to live unencumbered by pesky societal trappings like taxes, building codes, minimum wages or firearms restrictions. The idea is the brainchild of Patri Friedman, son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman – and also the inciting incident for BioShock, a series in which a group of objectivists go to live out in the ocean and everything works out perfectly for them.

This isn’t the first time the idea has been, um, floated: in the late 2000s, the Pirate Bay considered purchasing Sealand, a decommissioned oil platform near England, to turn the rig into a data haven free from prosecution under copyright laws. When the plan fell through, splinter groups started looking for another seabound body to place their hopes in… at which time, the most idealistic and fine print-averse elements of the nerd community took it into their heads that they’d actually be living out in the middle of nowhere, quickly sparking discussions like “nobody wants child pornography, but we have to have the option,” and, “actually, I think you’ll find that you are the person who sounds most like Adolph Hitler in this conversation.” At around that time, BioShock came out, and the would-be pioneers were saved by their own short attention spans and love of art-deco FPSes.

But now Peter Thiel wants to revive the dream, an idea one journalist charmingly calls “the most elaborate effort ever devised by a group of computer nerds to get invited to an orgy.” Thiel’s wisest moves so far – he’d like to see at least 20,000,000 people living in corporate micronations within the next 40 years – are his plan to remain on dry land, and his lack of golf clubs lying about the office. Seemingly no one has asked him whether the fictional failure of the exact thing he means to encourage puts a damper on his plans – presumably because that would just start the whole “is BioShock for or against Objectivism?” discussion all over again, and nobody wants that. Well, maybe some people do, but the best place for them is on an island in the middle of nowhere.

Aug 18, 2011

Source: Details

The investment was outlined in an in-depth profile of Thiel, published in the September issue of Details magazine.

[More from Mashable: Kenneth Cole Campaign Asks Your Thoughts on Abortion, Gay Rights Gun Control [VIDEO]]

The islands, writes Jonathan Miles in Details, would experiment with new — ie. libertarian — ideas of government, “free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050.”

The islands themselves would be “movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure[s] with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens — perhaps even hundreds — of these could be linked together.”

[More from Mashable: Facebook Gets Music Via Chrome Plugin]

Project lead Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and the grandson of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, hopes to launch “a flotilla of offices” off the coast of San Francisco as early as next year.

As odd as they sound, such micronations are nothing new. Among the better-known entities that have failed to be formally recognized by any other country is the Principality of Sealand, founded in 1967 off the coast of Suffolk, England. Sealand issues its own currency, postage stamps, passports and certificates of nobility. Its current population: 3.

Will Thiel’s venture be more successful? Check out the full story in Details.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

StartUp Britain is an initiative for entrepreneurs and delivered by entrepreneurs which will undertake a bus tour of some of the UK’s entrepreneurial hotspots.

It will visit the waterfront’s Crowne Plaza Hotel from 9am-12 noon on August 24 as part of a tour of 14 towns and cities in August and September.

The StartUp Britain campaign team includes experts, mentors, entrepreneurs and small business authors who will encourage budding entrepreneurs around the country to set up their own businesses.

A range of companies are backing the scheme, including AXA, Barclays, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, MITIE and PayPal who will be giving specialist business advice and discounts to entrepreneurs.

Cameron Mclean vice president of PayPal UK, Merchant Services, said: “PayPal UK supports payment processing for businesses of all sizes, from start-ups to major national brands.

“Small businesses are vital to the British economy and we at PayPal want to assist businesses to flourish and grow.”

Emma Jones, co-founder and interim chief executive of Start- Up Britain, added: “Thanks to help and support from our local StartUp champions, this tour allows us to take StartUp Britain across Britain.

“The bus will travel from North to South and East to West loaded with business experts, start-up advice and valuable offers.

“We will be meeting with students and helping them turn ideas into ventures and we’ll be visiting employees moving from employment into self-employment.

“I look forward to welcoming hundreds of start-ups and small businesses on board.”

For more details visit http:// www.startupbritain.org/ summerbustour/

A well known Libertarian, Thiel suggests these islands may be instrumental in “experimenting with new ideas for government.” One theory implements libertarian ideals such as no welfare, no minimum wage, looser building codes, and fewer weapons restrictions. Another more capitalistic approach called Appletopia, has a corporation starting the country as a business where the more popular it becomes the more valuable the real estate.

These micro-countries built on oil rig-like platforms will be moveable, diesel-powered 12,000 ton structures. Each structure may house up to 270 residents, and they are planned to link together into a massive web. Thiel plans to launch a flotilla office park off the coast of San Francisco next year and predicts full settlement of the first island in 2019. He and the Seasteading Institute aim to have 10 million floating residents by 2050.

Thiel’s ventures have always pushed boundaries. From wanting to use a currency unaffiliated with any nation for Paypal to funding DNA sequencing and commercial space travel, the uncharted and therefore, unregulated realms are his greatest interests. For those who remain pessimistic about this latest project Thiel says, “We don’t need to really worry about those people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously. And they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.”

+ Seasteading Institute

Via Details Magazine

Photos from the Seastead Design Contest

0

 print

email thisemail
facebookfacebook
diggdigg

York County residents contacted authorities after someone allegedly attempted to withdrawal money from their bank accounts through PayPal, an online payment website, York County Sheriff?s Office reports said.

A York woman said she became aware of the problem when her bank informed her she?d overdrawn her bank account. Multiple withdrawals in amounts in the range of $41 and $55 were allegedly made through her PayPal account she seldom uses.

A Fort Mill man filed a complaint after finding that PayPal had allegedly attempted to make a $100 withdrawal from his daughter?s bank account. The daughter had recently received a letter from Western Union asking her to confirm personal information to set up
an account.

The INQUIRER is not one to judge about how other people spend their money, but for now we are filing this under W for whacky or H for Howard Hughes.

According to a profile in the September issue of Details magazine the investor, who also makes an appearance in the film The Social Network and is a Facebook investor, is moving away from technology towards other less-charted waters.

In an interview with the magazine, Thiel said, “We’re at this pretty important point in society where we can either find a way to rediscover a frontier, or we’re going to be forced to change in a way that’s really tough.”

One way to change is to opt out, apparently, and Thiel, who appears to be frustrated by the lack of innovation he sees about him, is looking at really big ideas, including the aforementioned island paradise that would be built on a platform in international waters and exist free from the laws, morals and regulations of any other country.

According to Details, which has spoken with the idea man behind the floating island plans, Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, this project should start small but rapidly scale upwards to support tens of millions of people by 2050. Current plans are aiming at a moveable island for 270 people, which makes us wonder whether Thiel ever watched the TV show Lost.

“The ultimate goal,” Friedman said, “is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government,” which again sounds a bit like Lost to us.

Thiel is committed to the plans, and Friedman’s Seasteady Institute, to the tune of $1.25m, despite how controversial it sounds.

“When you start a company, true freedom is at the beginning of things,” he said. “The United States Constitution had things you could do at the beginning that you couldn’t do later. So the question is, can you go back to the beginning of things? How do you start over?”

Maybe you can, if you have the cash to do it. µ